Sun is a Drug

(mostly tongue in cheek)

It was a grey weekend.

It was the sky, the rain, the wet concrete, my sodden socks. It was the sense of dusk at 4pm, inertia, and the feeling of staying up too late at 4am, and then, the shadows under my eyes, and the groggy dullness of the next day. It was self inflicted.

There were occasional flecks of colour on the canvas - there were the autumnal hues of the birch leaves, and the orange "ryanic" in the chat client. The was the juxtaposition of a vivid yellow Ferrari in the darkness, driven by a twenty year old. There were the lime tinged fajitas (cheers Gordon) which didn't poison Agathe. There was the endlessly reoccurring crimson in American Beauty (what a film!), and the cheery kalaedescope of Family Guy. There was lying on my blue couch chatting to Niamh :)

As I roused myself this morning, the sky was blue! The light was pale gold! The thermometer said four degrees, but the sun warmed. The trees bestowed a confetti of coloured leaves upon me as I cut through the crisp air, and some wanker nearly ran over me in a vibrant red and yellow taxi.

So I'm sitting here with too much shine of my monitor, gazing at the text through someone else's fingerprints, but I don't have the heart to pull the blinds. It'll be dark by 5pm. But for now there's sun. I needed that :)

FInnish Language Trivia

While taking a rest in the cafe from climbing this evening, Joonas started to tell me about some good drinking songs that they have at HUT (Helsinki University of Technology).

One in particular translates into english as:
"he gets the tail in one ear, and the other uses the horn"
Now this is a metaphor for using the telephone (think old fashioned victorian wallmounted jobs).

Here's the intersting part. The words are slightly ambiguous. They have an exactly equal likelyhood of meaning
"he gets fucked in one ear, and the other uses the dick" I'd never have pegged the Finns as a nation of double-entendre- ... er... -ers, but between this, and the 40 words for the male member (Tove sent me a newsflash with the most recent additions to the list. Apparantly La Bamba is now slang for penis is Finland...)

Anywhee, speaking of climbing, I would like to state that I sent two (better say easy) routes like a gekko. It was good.

The Eraser

The Year was 2004, and a scourge was ravaging the Earth. They called it "Spyware". It was in the cities, on the streets, and even in the homes of everyday citizens. It spread through the phone-lines, and took route in the hard-drives of PCs, infecting offices, front rooms, and bedrooms all across the globe. It stayed, and it watched, and it waited. It annoyed the bejaysus out of me, personally (which is obviously the most salient fact). Nobody was safe.

Just when he was needed most, one man stepped forward to turn the tide. His name was Sean Kiernan, and he was The Eraser. (You know, I think I could get a screenplay from this...)

Congratulations to Sean for volunteering for Black Ops as the CS equivalent of an MI5 agent with Symantec. Remember to sleep with a gun under you pillow, and keep in mind: everyone you shag will die horribly at the hands of thugs and mercanaries working for the despicable S.P.Y. Corp...

Good luck man :D

Ok everybody: hum the James Bond theme tune while the credits roll...

Movies, Games and Videos

After hanging out with all you beautiful, UGC card toting folk last year; catching a flick about twice a week, and seeing almost every worthwhile film released between October and June, I've been going a bit cold turkey over here.

I saw King Arthur a few days after I got here, and Terminal about a month ago, and apart from that - nothing - so it was with great joy that I went to see The Bourne Supremacy on Thursday. Finnkino do a two-for-one on that day, so I wandered on down with Agathe. Actually, if you're feeling really bored you can click through and notice that Suomi is about 1 month behind good old Eire, and the UK for films - Collateral opened yesterday. Oh, and that all the arty european affairs that open in UGC are replaced here with arty Finnish affairs, sans subtitles.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Identity, so I was looking forward to Supremacy quite a bit, and wasn't disappointed. I'm a really bad judge at the moment (because I'm so happy to be seeing a movie at all, where'd my cynicism go?) but I thought it was par for the course. Nice car chase, slightly reminiscent of Ronin. Great camera work too, really builds an atmosphere.

It was also really nice to recognise a lot of the locations in Berlin, it made me quite reminiscent, I've really good memories of our hanging around Ostbahnhof, Alexanderplatz and Potsdammer Platz. Berlin was great!

Well, if that wasn't enough, discovery of the month has to be a plush meeting room between the girls & guys sauna rooms at work. It's decked out with about 6 couches, tables, a fridge, and a TV, and can be booked by anyone! We added a DVD playing laptop to the blend at enjoyed the fabulous Clerks courtesy of Gilles - how I've never heard of this film is beyond me - followed by AliG, innit, and a Dutch compilation of so-bad-they're-great-a-la-spawn trailers entitled something like "The Night of the Bad Taste".

Lately Unreal 2 had been keeping me up late. I feel in a bit of a gaming timewarp, I really want Unreal 2004, but €50 is a bit steep, it's 6 months old!

Anyway, that's enough of my ranting for now. Go n-éirí... :)

Finnish Rock Ninja

Alrighty. The other day, as I tried to rouse myself to head in to work (at about 11:30) I saw something a little odd.

A man, dressed in a black shell suit, and a black hat, was walking around by the rocks and dirt path outside my window. Except that he wasn't so much walking as stalking. He then proceeded to lay flat behind one of the rocks, lifting his head every now and then to see if the coast was clear. Eventually he decided it was, stood up, took a few steps, and then did a cartwheel across the path, landing in a crouch behing some bushes on the far side. After looking around for a few minutes, he stood up and walked off down the path.

I may be making a big assumption, but I think I've put a face to my screaming neighbour.

Technical bitching session (best ignored)

Well, after getting first frustrated by the pointless 1+0 RAID configuration (when there was a second, perfectly good disk left out of the array) and then angry with the state of my OS (I spent five minutes logging on and off in Finnish, and killing random processes to try and stop the freeze that happends after every boot, and get processes running) I turned off the power, opened the case, fiddled with cables, restarted, made a new, useful 2+0 array, and set about installing win2k.

Problem. In my haste I forgot to consider the possibility that win2k doesn't come shipped with RAID support. It doesn't by the way, at least not for my motherboard. Hmm. After some earnest cursing, I rummaged for my Linux boot cd, and got the drivers on to floppy. Excellent! On with installation.

More problems. Basically, I had to reformat both hard-drives. I formatted one as part of the installation. "Setup will continue after reboot" apparantly means "After rebooting, we will be unable to find your hard-drives" to microsoft. I managed to get it fully installed eventually, thinking "Great, now it'll boot!" It wouldn't boot. So I installed win2k on the second harddrive, in case somehow it was booting from it first (at this point it seemed sensible). Same issue. It turns out that for magical reasons beyond my ken, if I leave the installation cd in the drive, it gives me the option to boot off the cd. Upon ignoring this it give me a choice between both my versions of Win2k. If the cd is not present, it finds no bootable drives. This is as irritating as fibreglass underpants.

So now, many, many installations later, and much later, I can't actually see what I'm typing, and I'm going to go to bed and leave this till tomorrow.

It's ok, I live

Apologies for falling off the face of the earth just there. For the last two weekends I've had people over, and so haven't had time to blog. Work has been getting busier simultaneously (I'm trying to teach all the toys to play nicely with each other), and anyway, I always feel guilty about blogging at work (even if I recognise it as part of my "background process cycle"* )

Anyways, last weekend Aoife became my first guest. All other prospective visitors would do well to note that Aoife has defined the standard gift pack. I was so impressed I took a photo, but then I lost it. I'll just have to paint it with words: laid out on my bed, on top of a chopping board (which was a gift, but I will exlude from the standard gift pack definition, on the grounds that there are only so many chopping-boards a man needs) are Lyons tea bags, Jacobs biscuits, Cadburys chocolate, Kilmeaden cheese (ooooh! Cheddar!), Flahavan oats, a brac (with a ring. I know this for sure, I found it in my mouth), and something else, I'm certain, but I can't remember... Oh yeah, Tayto!

This weekend, Paul (my younger brother) became the Buzz Aldrin of Helsinki visits. He also came literally laden with goodies - about a kilogram of cadburys, Tayto, a random selection of my cds, and best of all, my courtesy-of-Ryanic Acquisition Services surround sound speaker system! W00T! This got fully tested with lots and lots of family guy episodes :)

I'd give a full account of our exploits for both weekends, but I'm afraid that future visitors will twig that I've a set list of activities about half way through their tours, become disgusted by my lack of originality and spontaneity, and kill me with a serendipitously discarded hatchet, between locations, just to spice things up. No really, this is my phobia.

I will say that I had a great time on both weekends :D

To bring things up to date, it's gotten seriously cold here. It was 2 degrees this morning cycling in, and my hands were so cold, that I couldn't operate the lock on my bike for a few minutes. Then they heated up, but too quickly, so they stung like hell. Also, lack of sleep meant I slept in and missed Taekwondo at 11:15, which was irritating.

Why do I lack sleep? you ask. In short, I'm convinced that one of my neighbours is a lunatic. Not in the "jaysus he's a lunatic, would you look at him" generic description befitting Meath GAA players, but a genuine, bedlam candidate. At 5.21am he started shouting, as if he was starting a screaming match with a spouse (a sport in some parts of Helsinki). Thing is, there was no shouting back. This went on sporadically for a while (I can't be more accurate, it was 5am) until, after a lull, he started screaming. As in "aaaaahhhhh.... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" screaming... there was banging in there too... and maybe a door on the corridor opening. Certainly some lights in the building opposite went on, so he was damn loud. This repeated itself at intervals.

Finally, my computer is sick. It is currently about as stable as my neighbour. I suspect I'm unwittingly hosting a rogue html server on it. Among the more unusual symptoms it displays, is a slight lookup error: if I try to go to www.symantec.com, firefox instead opens the page I host from my Apache2 server. Furthermore, I couldn't uninstall Apache. I'm not sure why, the error message was in Finnish, but basically it's ill. So tonight I'm going to format, install win2k, try and fix the RAID Array (which is using only one of the two hard drives I have) and hopefully have time to play the Judge Dread game I bought from someone at work. If I come back ranting about how you're all scum you'll know I was successful :)

*Background process cycle

I've understood for some time that I have a background process cycle. Whenever I have a really difficult problem, I sometimes achieve best results by trying to tackle it, failing, and then zoning out for a bit. When I come back to it, I generally can find a solution. It may not be the solution, in which case I rinse and repeat.

This is all to do with the sub-conscious, and it generally well understood, but lately I have come to embrace this aspect of my psyche. In general it allows me to run into a brick wall, then catch up on the world of IT via slashdot, wired, etc, safe in the knowledge that my beaver-like subconscious is on the job :)

A word of warning though: studies show that the intense thinking you put into the problem before hand is an essential part of the process. Delegating difficulties to your subconscious, with no effort on your part will not work.

Now the next time your boss catches you giggling at Dilbert.com, you have a ready, technical sounding excuse :)